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Source: Praktyka teoretyczna

Theoretical Practice

Location: Poland
Author(s): Ankica Čakardić
Title: Hegel and Anticapitalism: Notes on the Political Economy of Poverty
Hegel and Anticapitalism: Notes on the Political Economy of Poverty
Issue: 43/2021
Citation Ankica Čakardić. "Hegel and Anticapitalism: Notes on the Political Economy of Poverty".
style: Praktyka teoretyczna 43:93-130.

https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1100871
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} ANKICA ČAKARDIĆ (ORCID: 0000-0001-9839-9563)

Hegel and Anticapitalism:

Notes on the Political Economy
of Poverty

From the very beginning of his philosophical journey, Hegel

demonstrated time and again his interest in the questions of
political economy. In his earliest writings on religion, politics
and economics, Hegel expressed his concern for a topic that
was to play a vital role in his later works: the phenomenon of
private property. In order to present Hegel’s notes on politi-
cal economy more clearly, I have divided this paper into
three sections. The first one deals with Hegel’s analysis of
private property, industrialisation, and capitalism. The
second addresses his attitudes toward the French Revolution,
the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the problem
of labour. Finally, the third section is concerned with the
political economy of poverty in the context of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, and in it, I point to Hegel’s emphasis that
extreme and increasing poverty and pauperisation are not
accidental phenomena, but are in fact endemic to the
modern commodity-producing society.
Keywords: labour, private property, poverty, the state, Hegel

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Since from Hegel philosophical roads lead just unavo-

idably to the most dangerous robber caves of Feuerbach
and Marx there remained to the bourgeois philosophers
nothing but to annul Hegel from the history of philo-
sophy simply by a command, and to let science jump
back “to Kant” by a magic gesture.
(Luxemburg 1990, 490)

Introduction

Although the interest in the history of philosophy is as old as philosophy

itself, critical analyses, interpretations, research methodology, and reflec-
tions on its purpose started to develop only at the beginning of the 19th
century. Before that, the history of philosophy had been written in a chro-
nological or anecdotal manner, often with an a priori understanding of
a particular philosophical system, but rarely with strict analysis and
reference to the historical development of ideas.1 In contrast to this
tradition, Hegel insisted on a historical understanding of the develop-
ment of philosophy and stepped out of descriptive narratives. He voiced
a “reproach of one-sidedness,” with which historians of philosophy,
depending on their mood, attempted to describe ideas, concepts, and
opinions (Hegel 1995, XLV). He compared these historians of philoso-
phy “to animals which have listened to all the tones in some music, but
to whose senses the unison, the harmony of their tones, has not pene-
trated” (Hegel 1995, XLV). Departing from the thesis that philosophy
and politics, society and state, morality and right, share a common
basis—Zeitgeist, Hegel set out to investigate how and why a particular
philosophy occurs at a given time and place as a dominant system of
thought. By following in these footsteps, we will set ourselves a very
similar goal—to examine how Hegel positions himself vis-a-vis his own

1 Let us recall here that Karl Marx’s dissertation on the difference between
the natural philosophy of Epicurus and Democritus—a dissertation in which he
demonstrated how, from the antiquity all the way to the 19 th century, Epicurus’
philosophy was marginalised without a clear explanation in favour of reproducing
Cicero’s critique of Epicurus’ interpretation of the motion of atoms—stands out
as one of the earliest examples of a critique of ahistorical narratives of the history
of philosophy. Already the 19th- and the early-20th-century philosophical discus-
sions introduced a methodological shift toward a more systematic presentation
in the history of philosophy, as was the case with the works of Eduard Zeller,
Theodor Gomperz, and Hermann Diels.

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time and how socio-political occurrences of that time affected his phi-
losophy, just as his philosophy affected politics, the concept of right,
and the critique of political economy.
In this paper, I will develop a Marxist analysis of Hegel’s political
economy and identify some of his politically progressive, or—to use the
parlance of our time—“leftist” views. However, since he produced no
single systematic text which could offer us an overarching explanatory
model for his vision of political economy, I single out particular “notes,”
ideas and conceptions from his opus. I start my analytical trajectory with
Hegel’s early works and move toward his more mature writings. My task
is structured as a discussion in three parts. In the first section, I deal with
Hegel’s analysis of private property, industrialisation, and capitalism. In
the second, I turn to his elaborations on the French Revolution, the trans-
ition from feudalism to capitalism, and the issue of labour. Finally, the
third section studies the political economy of poverty in the context of
Hegel’s most significant and simultaneously the most controversial work
of his late period—the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (“Grundlinien
der Philosophie des Rechtes, oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft in
Grundrissen” 1821). Here, I point to Hegel’s insistence that extreme and
increasing poverty and pauperisation are not accidental phenomena, but
are in fact endemic to modern commodity-producing society. I will thereby
pay due attention to the British political-economic lore that Hegel explo-
red in the works of Adam Ferguson, James Steuart and Adam Smith, but
also in English newspapers and journals which he regularly read.

1. Private Property, Industrialisation, and Capitalism

Already in his early writings on theology, politics, and economy, Hegel

tackled an issue that was to play a very important role in his mature
works—the phenomenon of private property. He raises questions per-
taining to the critique of capitalism, and offers poignant analyses of the
relationship between politics and production, individualism and poli-
tical universalism, exaggerated subjectivity and alienation, as well labour
in industrial society (Skomvoulis 2015; Thompson 2015; Ross 2015;
Buchwalter 2015a). Since Hegel never produced a systematic study that
could serve as a foundation for his critique of capitalist political economy,
in this paper I will identify several of his essays and texts which, in their
own specific ways, engage in a critique of political economy, social poli-
tics, and, in Theodor Adorno’s words, “the experience, itself unconscious,
of abstract labor” (Adorno 1993, 20).

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In this paper, I draw on the understanding of capitalism as a very

complex historical form or social-property relations that, due to the
specificity of its productive and reproductive processes, differs signi-
ficantly from feudalism and the slaveholding system (Čakardić 2019,
19–36). Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of
human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade
and commerce (Meiksins Wood 2002). The capitalist mode of pro-
duction has its own economic logic and a specific class configuration
that dictates the unique development and form of social relations. The
capitalist system was born in England in the early modern period, with
mutually reinforcing agricultural and industrial sectors, as interpreted
by the tradition of Political Marxism (Brenner 1985a; 1985b; Meiksins
Wood 1991; 2002; Comninel 2000), following the example of Marx
(Marx 1982, 877). Hegel bases his analysis of private property and
poverty on the examples from British political economy because this
country had already gone through the transition from feudalism to
capitalism.
Capitalism is a system in which absolutely all economic actors—
whether producers or appropriators—depend, in one way or another,
on the market to meet their basic needs. Thus, no one in the socio-
-economic arena appears “directly” in the market—they do so “indirec-
tly.” Unlike non-capitalist societies—where producers had non-market
access to the means of production, and appropriators used various instru-
ments of political and physical power to appropriate surplus products—
in capitalism there is a mutual market dependence of producers and
appropriators in which everyone is subjected to the imperatives of com-
petition, accumulation, and labor productivity growth. These impera-
tives also represent the nature of the capitalist market, which defines
access to the basic means of human existence. The conditioning of exi-
stence by the strict imperatives of the accumulation and maximization
of profit in capitalism does not take place under the control and force
of military or political power; on the contrary, individuals are finally
“emancipated” from such feudalist repression.
Capitalism appears in its full form only when the older, communal
ways of life and subsistence have disappeared, or, more precisely, when
they have been destroyed. For capitalism to develop, existing traditions
in the access to land as a means of self-reproduction must be shaken, as
are communal ties between people. It does not tolerate communal owner-
ship, and it is realized by a mode of production exclusively based on
private ownership. Hegel was well aware of these shifts in political eco-
nomy, and he was very critical of its capitalist tendencies.

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During his studies in Tübingen, Hegel made notes on John Locke

and developed an interest in economic analysis, that is, political eco-
nomy (Cullen 1979, 16). These notes were mediated by Lockean reflec-
tions on the notion of property as an embodiment of workers’ perso-
nalities. Hegel’s interest in economic theory may be illustrated through
a couple of vitally important sections from the Elements of the Philoso-
phy of Right, especially §51 (Hegel 2014, 81). As we shall see, the
political and economic framework of the Elements of the Philosophy of
Right grew out of the implicit antagonism between wealth and poverty
in contemporary society, and it was long before Marx that Hegel empha-
sized the historical and societal problem of the transition from feudalism
to capitalism, and warned against the dehumanising effects of indu-
strialisation and labour.
Charles Taylor points out that Hegel, in his analyses of contemporary
industrial production and its inherent tendency to move toward a deeper
and more sophisticated division of labour, manages to locate the origins
and the historical emergence of proletariat (Taylor 1975, 437; Taylor
1979, 130). A consequence of that new class configuration, as Taylor
claims while reading and citing Hegel, consists in the fact that “the
proletariat will be impoverished, materially by low wages and uncertainty
of employment, and spiritually by the narrowness and monotony of its
work” (Taylor 1979, 130). Taylor sees the natural consequence of this
process as nothing other than “reducing the proletariat to »bestiality«”
(Taylor 1975, 437). Along the same lines, Nathan Ross writes that Hegel
refers to the “logic of mechanism to describe those aspects of the modern,
industrial economy,” and to point to the political and economic problem
of “the industrialization of labour, the rise of self-interest as a constitu-
tive force in politics, and the need for state intervention in managing
the economy” (Ross 2008, 4).
Domenico Losurdo demonstrates with equal perceptiveness how
“Hegel’s unrestricted acceptance of advanced industrial society never
turns into a romanticized account of it” (Losurdo 2004, 150). In fact,
poverty represents an inevitable consequence of industrialisation, and
almost becomes “synonymous, as Hegel constantly emphasizes, with
a condition of generalized violence” (Losurdo 2004, 150). Michalis
Skomvoulis, in his article Hegel Discovers Capitalism, details Hegel’s
“discovery” of capitalism, which occurred in the early 1800s, when Hegel
first encountered the theories of modern political economy associated
with Smith, Ferguson, and Steuart (Skomvoulis 2015). For Michael
Thompson, in the “Capitalism as Deficient Modernity: Hegel against
the Modern Economy,” the pathologies associated by Hegel with capi-

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talist economies entail that his political philosophy is essentially “anti-

-capitalist” (Thompson 2015). All of these are interpretative variations
that neatly direct us to Hegel’s interest in the issue of private property
and capitalism, which are imposed on the already strained relationship
between the productive and the political sphere.
There is no doubt that in his theory Hegel supported the sanctity of
property rights, yet he was well aware of the negative impact they had,
not only on the individual, but also on society as a whole. In principle,
Hegel defends the legitimacy of egotistic action and the consequent ine-
quality in civil society (Mowad 2015, 71). “For many,” Andrew Buchwal-
ter emphasizes, “Hegel remains first and foremost a champion of the
Prussian state and state power generally,” but “it is nonetheless a mistake
to disregard his possible contribution to reflections of the nature and
status of capitalist market societies” (Buchwalter 2015a, 2). Hegel descri-
bes how mutual dependence for the sake of satisfying personal needs
forces individuals to engage in reciprocal acknowledgement in the histo-
rical process of commodity exchange (Saito 2015, 43–44). “By a dialec-
tical movement,” writes Hegel, “subjective selfishness turns into a contribu-
tion towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else” (Hegel 2014, §199,
233). He reminds us, as is pointed out in the studies of Shlomo Avineri
and Bernard Cullen, that extreme poverty is not an accidental phenome-
non, but rather a key element of the modern commodity-producing society
(Avineri 1972, 96; Cullen 1979, 66). It is a result of the rapid expansion
of the market and of continually-changing needs and fashions within the
internal logic of the productive process, a consequence “of (changes in-
—A.Č.) fashion or a fall in prices due to inventions in other countries”
(Hegel 1983, 139–140). “This inequality between wealth and poverty,”
writes Hegel, “this need and necessity, lead to the utmost dismemberment
of the will, to inner indignation and hatred” (Hegel 1983, 140).
Hegel’s understanding of economic and political alienation of modern
world was a direct consequence of religious alienation and social gaps
among the Christians, which he describes in The Positivity of the Christian
Religion (Hegel 1996a). In the chapter “Common Ownership of Goods,”
he brusquely criticises the Catholic Church and very directly addresses
the class antagonism between the wealthy and the poor:

In the Catholic church this enrichment of monasteries, priests, and churches

has persisted; little is distributed to the poor, and this little in such a way that
beggars subsist on it, and by an unnatural perversion of things the idle vagrant
who spends the night on the streets is better off in many places than the indu-
strious craftsman. (Hegel 1996a, 88)

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Even sharper remarks may be found in the chapter entitled “Equality”:

A simpleminded man may hear his bishop or superintendent preaching with

touching eloquence about these principles of humility, about the abhorrence
of all pride and all vanity, and he may see the edified expressions with which
the lords and ladies in the congregation listen to this; but if, when the sermon
is over, he approaches his prelate and the gentry with the hope of finding them
humble brothers and friends, he will soon read in their laughing or contemp-
tuous faces that all this is not to be taken au pied de la lettre and that only in
Heaven will it find its literal application. (Hegel 1996a, 89)

In order to address social, class and economic issues more directly,

Hegel compiled a detailed study of the Bernese fiscal system during his
stay in the city (Rosenkranz 1844, 61). Also, having observed social
differences among the believers, he scrupulously analysed the English
Poor Laws, which testifies to Hegel’s passionate reading and constant
following of foreign newspapers and journals (Rosenkranz 1844, 85;
Waszek 1988, 85; Buck-Morrs 2009, 18).2 Even though none of these
studies survived, a text dealing with similar issues that endured is Hege-
l’s 1798 anonymous German translation of the French pamphlet Con-
fidential letters on the Previous Governmental-Legal Relations of the Waad-
tland (Pays de Vaud) to the City of Bern, originally written by the Bernese
jurist Jean-Jacques Cart (“Vertrauliche Briefe über das vormalige staat-
srechtliche Verhältnis des Waadtlandes »Pays de Vaud« zur Stadt Bern
von Cart, Jean Jacques”).3 The translation features Hegel’s foreword
and notes (Hegel 1970a), and in the notes and remarks to the translated
letters he displays a burning interest in the specific economic, legal, and
political aspects of the Bernese dominance over the Vaud canton, and

2 In his analysis of the 18th-century Scottish thinkers, Norbert Waszek

mentions a number of Hegel’s extracts from British newspapers (Quarterly Review,
Edinburgh Review, Morning Chronicle) which have survived in manuscript and
are now kept at Berlin and Harvard (Waszek 1988, 85). Waszek notes: “For the
central years of the German Enlightenment (1763–1789), the crucial significance
of the journals can hardly be overestimated: they sprang up by the thousands,
they were run by men like Lessing and Nicolai, they received contributions from
even greater men like Kant and Herder, and they were read by everybody, includ-
ing the rising generation of Goethe and Hegel” (Waszek 1988, 66). Susan Buck-
Morrs underlines the affinities between the politics of Hegel’s early philosophy of
spirit and his reading of the journal Minerva (Buck-Morrs 2009, 18).
3 It was only in 1909 that Hegel was recognised as the author of the
translation and its commentary. Curiously enough, this was in fact Hegel’s first
published work (Avineri 1972, 5–6).

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emphasizes the problems of nepotism and oligarchy. There is even a brief

and sharply critical discussion of the Bernese tax and statistics system.
At one point in the pamphlet, Hegel roughly criticises the political and
legal organisation of Bern, in which “the criminal court is entirely in
the hands of the government” and “in no other country (…) are so many
people sentenced to death by hanging, wheeling, and decapitation, as
in this canton” (Hegel 1982a, 198).
During that period, alongside the critical fragments on the traditio-
nal state, Hegel continued to contemplate the relation between Chri-
stianity and political institutions, and critically examined the role of
institutionalised religion, superstition and natural law in opposing
modernist notions and customary law, an intellectual venture he had
already begun in The Positivity of the Christian Religion. I am unable to
sufficiently stress the fact that Hegel was almost alone among the phi-
losophers of his time—except for, perhaps, Fichte (Rose 1995, 55–56;
Saito 2015, 37–41)—in identifying the crucial role of the economics
in political, religious, and cultural life.4 In a letter to his friend Schelling
from January 1795, he wrote:

Orthodoxy is not to be shaken as long as the profession of it is bound up with

worldly advantage and interwoven with the totality of a state. This interest is
too strong for orthodoxy to be given up so soon, and it operates without anyone
being clearly aware of it as a whole. As long as this condition prevails, orthodoxy
will have on its side the entire ever-preponderant herd of blind followers or
scribblers devoid of higher interests and thoughts. (Hegel 1984, 31)

Only a few years later, in the commentaries to his reading of the

Gospel of Matthew, published in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,
Hegel used a direct and polemic tone to communicate his bitterness
towards the exhausting effects of private interests that intersected with
the political, social, and religious sphere of life, especially in the form
of private property. In that work, he wrote the following:

About the command which follows (Matthew vi. 19–34) to cast aside care for
one’s life and to despise riches, as also about Matthew xix. 23: “How hard it is
for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” there is nothing to be said; it
is a litany pardonable only in sermons and rhymes, for such a command is

4 It should be noted that some analyses point to the fact that Hegel was
not the first in his generation to perceive, or even analyse, problems in modern
civil society, because it had already been done by the young Romantics in the late
1790s (Beiser 2006, 243).

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without truth for us. The fate of property has become too powerful for us to
tolerate reflections on it, to find its abolition thinkable. (Hegel 1996b, 221)

Hegel was quite preoccupied with the problem of duality and the
separation of institutional religion and the state. His early theological
works definitely ought to be read through the lens of an attempt to solve
that conflict by demanding cohesion and unity, a role-model for which
he saw in the organisation of the ancient polis. In his foreword to Hege-
l’s Political Writings, Jürgen Habermas argues that Hegel treated the
ancient polis as a paradigmatic example of a political structure that in
itself united the specific and the social being (Habermas 1966, 358).5
Despite the fact that one of Hegel’s primary goals was to find out “how
to reach such a synthesis within the conditions of the modern world”
(Avineri 1972, 33), in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, it seems that
the gap between the religion and the state is represented as even deeper
and more complicated, which is supported by the final sentence of this
unusual treatise: “And it is its fate that church and state, worship and
life, piety and virtue, spiritual and worldly action, can never dissolve
into one” (Hegel 1966b, 301).

2. The French Revolution, Feudalism, and Labour

Hegel studied theology and philosophy at Tübingen, where he met the

Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderin and his junior by five years—the
philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. As a student, he
admired and avidly supported the French Revolution, which remained
continuously present in his philosophy in different ways (Fluss 2016;
Fluss and Greene 2020). In his student years, Hegel served as member
of a political club that was under surveillance for its activities (Avineri

5 There are at least three approaches to Hegel’s view of the ancient polis
as a concept that could bear political significance in modern times. In his foreword
to Hegel’s Political Writings, Habermas states that the ancient polis was a source
of inspiration for the Hegelian concept of the modern state, which was sketched
between 1798 and 1801. In Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, Avineri recognizes
that it was already in Frankfurt, during the work on The Positivity of the Christian
Religion, that Hegel became aware of the impossibility of restoring the ancient
polis in modern times, citing Hegel’s polemic on Klopstock’s fragment called Is
Judea, then, the Teutons’ Fatherland? as proof (Avineri 1972, 21–22). Finally, in
The Young Hegel, György Lukács argues that, in The Positivity of Christian Religion,
Hegel was still haunted by the utopian vision of returning to ancient Greece,
which he finally abandoned only in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate.

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1972, 3). Some pieces of evidence and legends tell us that, during his
studies, Hegel participated in several student activities related to the
French Revolution. One of those legends is related by Terry Pinkard in
his biography on Hegel:

For Hegel, the French Some fellow students later recounted an anecdote about this period according
Revolution represented to which the trio of Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel erected a “freedom tree”—a
a crucial turning-point kind of revolutionary Maypole—on the fourteenth of July, 1793 (a year into
in the development of the Terror, during which the guillotines were working full time) on a field near
modern philosophy. In the town of Tübingen and danced the revolutionary French dance, the Carmo-
his words, it was gnole, around it, all the while singing the words to the Marseillaise (which
Schelling had translated into German). (Pinkard 2000, 24)
a “world-historical
overturn,” characterised For Hegel, the French Revolution represented a crucial turning-point
by the tension between in the development of modern philosophy. In his words, it was a “world-
the forces that celebra- -historical overturn,” characterised by the tension between the forces
ted progressive ideals that celebrated progressive ideals of revolutionary consciousness, and
of revolutionary con- those who rejected the direction of the world-historical change, and
sciousness, and those advocated for traditional values, political restoration, and “good old
who rejected the rights.” Losurdo notes:
direction of the world-
-historical change, and (I)t is with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, that the French Revolution finds its the-
advocated for traditio- oretical expression. The liberal authors of the time, on the other hand, develop
their thought for the most part during the controversy and the struggle against
nal values, political
the French Revolution. And if, as we believe, the political and ideal legacy that
restoration, and “good
stems from the French Revolution constitutes the foundation par excellence of
old rights.”
modern freedom, in order to gain a thorough understanding of this freedom it
is necessary to draw from classic German philosophy rather than from its con-
temporary liberal tradition. (Losurdo 2004, 305)

In The Hegel Variations, Fredric Jameson argues that

the French Revolution was not only an immense political overturning, the end
of the feudal system or the displacement of a whole aristocratic elite and of the
monarchy itself by the masses of the common people, (but—A.Č.) also the
climax of a process of secularisation as such. (Jameson 2010, 60)

This is a very valuable argument if we want to explore the secular

influence of the French Revolution on philosophy, the capacity for indi-
vidual progress, and the political potential of labour beyond feudalist
privilege or relations of production characteristic of feudalism. It is also
crucial for exploring the relation of feudalist and sacral tradition vis-a-vis

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the modern legal concept of the state as Hegel attempted to systematise

it in his social philosophy. Jameson writes:

This process (of French Revolution—A.Č.) is not merely to be characterized

as the coming of wage labor, although it was also that, but also as the libera-
tion of human activity from the shackles of the sacred—the so-called “carrière
ouverte aux talents”: not just the possibility of rising beyond the traditional
caste barriers of the old regime, but the plebeianization of that old religious
conception of vocation as such or “calling”: the chance now to follow ones
interests and to practice whatever activity speaks to our individual subjecti-
vities. (Jameson 2010, 61)

Hegel’s orientation towards big historical events of his time has ano-
ther peculiar trait which sets him apart from all his contemporary phi-
losophers. György Lukács contends:

It is not only the case that he made the greatest and fairest German assessment
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. In addition, he is the only
German thinker to have made a serious attempt to come to grips with the
industrial revolution in England. He is the only man to have forged a link
between the problems of classical English economics and those of philosophy
and dialectics. (Lukács 1975, XXVI)

“We stand,” as was stated in a lecture on speculative philosophy held

in Jena at the end of 1806, “in an important epoch, a ferment, where
spirit has jolted, emerged from its former shape, and gained a new one”
(Ritter 1984, 53). In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes:

Besides, it is not difficult to see that our own epoch is a time of birth and a trans-
ition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence
and its ways of thinking; it is now of a mind to let them recede into the past and
to immerse itself in its own work at reshaping itself. (Hegel 2018, 8–9)

“For Hegel, the French Revolution is that event around which all
the determinations of philosophy in relation to its time are clustered,”
claims Joachim Ritter in his essay, and “there is no other philosophy
that is a philosophy of revolution to such a degree and so profoundly,
in its innermost drive, as that of Hegel” (Ritter 1984, 43). “The central
historical events,” according to Lukács, “are the French Revolution and
the resulting class struggles in France with their consequent impact on
internal German problems” (Lukács 1975, XXVI). “For his part, Hegel
hailed the French Revolution,” maintains Arno Mayer, “as a »world-

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-historical« event precisely because of its engagement on behalf of man,

regardless of religion or nation. Needless to say, in their time Marx and
Engels fully shared this view” (Mayer 2000, 31). Even the Young Hege-
lians, like Bruno Bauer, asserted that “Hegel’s Phenomenology never really
left the soil of the French Revolution” (Fluss and Greene 2020). Hegel
also diligently followed French intellectual trends. He read Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and even praised French atheism, or those
currents of the Radical Enlightenment, as having a deep and rebellious
feeling which “opposed the meaningless hypotheses and assumptions of
positive religion” (Fluss and Greene 2020).
As I mentioned earlier, Hegel had celebrated the storming of the
Bastille as a student. However, he simultaneously cultivated the spirit
of revolution in later years. This is evidenced by the following anecdote,
to which Pinkard draws attention. In July 1820, having travelled to
Dresden, Hegel gathered with friends and colleagues at the inn called
the Blue Star. When the waiter served him the common local Meißner
wine with the dinner, the philosopher rejected the offer and ordered
Sillery, the most exquisite champagne of its time. Having somewhat
secretively passed the bottle around the table to his colleagues for a toast,
everybody accepted the generous gesture, yet they were confused about
what they were toasting. Pinkard describes the rest of the scene:

(W)hen it became clear that nobody at the table knew exactly why they should
be drinking to that particular day, Hegel turned in mock astonishment and with
raised voice declared, “This glass is for the 14th of July, 1789—to the storming
of the Bastille.” (Pinkard 2000, 451)

Although he always cultivated the rationalist assumptions of the

French Revolution as a source of modern rights, after 27th of July
1794, when Robespierre was taken to the guillotine, Hegel grew incre-
asingly discontented with the path the Revolution had taken, especially
with the counter-revolutionary consequences he observed from the
perspective of the old German state. The principles of the Revolution
did not exert a positive influence on Germany, and feudalist alienation
was not replaced with a new cohesive community of free citizens that
was founded on the harmony of the private and the public. Neither
did it lead to the emancipation of the bourgeoisie from feudal privi-
leges and the rights derived from them. Universalism thus retreated
to the realm of thought, instead of turning into reality. A unique
opportunity was missed, as Hegel understood it, for reason to finally
actualise itself, so “that the leavened dough of revolutionary principles

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of that time” and “the abstract thoughts of freedom” finally be trans-

lated into positive constitutional law (Hegel 2014a, 64). The relation-
ship between the German state and the French Revolution was descri-
bed by Hegel in the following way:

The attitude of the Estates that have been convened in Württemberg is precisely
the opposite of what began twenty-five years ago in a neighboring realm and
what at the time had resonated among all spirits: that in a state constitution
nothing ought to be recognized as valid except what can be recognized according
to the right of reason. (Hegel 2014a, 64)

In the atmosphere of very critical attitudes toward the German

monarchy, princely appearances and their political address, which reve-
aled “the emptiness (…), and in general the nullity and unreality of
public life,” as well as “moral and hypochondriacal self-conceit toward
the public” (Hegel 2014a, 37), utterly dissatisfied with the poor recep-
tion of the spiritual principles of the Revolution in Germany, Hegel
wrote thus in the early draft of his introduction to The German Consti-
tution:

The organization of this body called the German constitution was built up in
a life totally different from the life it had later and has now. The justice and
power, the wisdom and courage of times past; the honour and blood, the wel-
lbeing and distress of generations long dead; and the relationships and manners
which have perished with them; all these are expressed in the forms of this body.
But the course of time and of the civilization that has been meanwhile develo-
ping has sundered the fate of that past from the life of the present. The building
in which the fate dwelt is no longer supported by the fate of the present gene-
ration. (Hegel 1982b, 346)

Hegel was working on The German Constitution for several years,

that is, from 1798 to 1802. The text may serve as an excellent illustration
of his sensibility for the social and political topics that concerned him
every day. How immersed he was in contemporary socio-political events
becomes quite clear in his famous quote: “(r)eading the morning new-
spaper is the realist’s morning prayer” (Hegel 2002, 247). In The German
Constitution Hegel begins his comprehensive analysis of the German
state of the time and its administration with a sharp and negative criti-
que of the political situation in his country of origin, and simply asserts
that “Germany is no longer a state” (Hegel 2004a, 6). The universal
power of the state to enact laws had evaporated, and as a consequence

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the widespread positivist legislative “no longer treats constitutional law

as a science, but only as a description of what exists empirically and not
comfortably with a rational idea” (Hegel 2004a, 6). For Hegel,

German constitutional law is therefore a collection of private rights; (…) the

state had in the first instance no other function in this regard, but to confirm
that it had been deprived of its power. (Hegel 2004a, 11)

The elaborate manner in which Hegel addressed the transition from

feudalism to capitalism in this work suggests that he engaged in a the-
oretical attempt to examine and dissect the uneasy relationship between
private rights and the public sphere. He stated that the birth of the
modern world was marked by a progressive separation of the private
and the public (Losurdo 2004, 64). Furthermore, he highlights the
difficulty of establishing a modern constitutional state as an alternative
to a feudalist monarchy that relies on “a register of the most varied
constitutional rights acquired in the manner of civil law (Privatrecht)”
(Hegel 2004a, 12). Avineri posits that Hegel’s discourse was aimed at
emancipating the German political system from the shackles of feu-
dalism, medievalism and petty absolutism, and at helping bring about
the modernisation of political life in Germany (Avineri 1972, 61).
Hegel’s idea of the constitution as reason itself relied on putting in
place the administrative and rational order in the fragmented German
state, which was characterised by a mixture of various feudal private-
-public power mechanisms. This idea was also anchored in Hegel’s
discontent with the consequences of changes in social relations which
historically resulted from the erosion of the feudal system and from
the constitution of new class configurations. Unlike Britain or France,
late-18th-century Germany was still not a capitalist and nation state
(Lafrance 2019, 124) as it was after 1871, when the Second German
Reich was created. From 1815 to 1871 Germany was splintered into
thirty-nine independent states that constituted the German Confede-
ration (“Deutscher Bund”). The political and economic power of Ger-
many were not yet separate entities, and this unity of state admini-
stration and its means of creating surplus value represented one of the
core elements of feudal social relations. It was only under capitalism
that these two spheres were divorced from each other (Čakardić 2019,
20–21). The historian James Bryce, in his book The Holy Roman Empire,
published in 1864, offered a vivid description of the fragmentation
and decentralization of Germany at the time:

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One day’s journey in Germany might take a traveller through the territories of
a free city, a sovereign abbot, a village belonging to an imperial knight, and the
dominions of a landgrave, a Duke, a prince and a king, so small, so numerous
and so diverse were the principalities. (Cited in: Cullen 1979, 42)

Another important topic Hegel struggled with in The German Con-

stitution was the absence of a “common political authority” (Staatsgewalt)
that would enforce the law across the whole German territory. “No
constitution,” he wrote, “as a whole, as a state, has a poorer system than
the German Empire” (Hegel 1982b, 345). He alleged that German laws
are based on pure selfishness, instead of universal needs:

Political powers and rights are not offices of state designed in accordance with
an organisation of the whole, and the services and duties of individuals are not
determined by the needs of the whole. On the contrary, every individual mem-
ber of the political hierarchy, every princely house, every estate (Stand), every
city, guild, etc.—everything which has rights or duties in relation to the state—
has acquired them for itself. (Hegel 2004a, 11–2)

In parallel with this, Hegel was developing his criticism of German

constitutional law as a form of private law. He wrote the following in
the early draft of the introduction to The German Constitution:

Possession existed before law and did not come from laws but was conquered
and turned into customary law. In its origin, therefore, German public law is
basically private law, and political rights are legal possession, property. (Hegel
1982b, 347–348)

A couple of sentences later Hegel concludes that the privileged class

affords itself an independence from the whole, and that this privilege
of “isolation” from the state as a community represents an exclusive class
right. “The rights of this extraction from the whole,” he claims, “which
individual Estates achieved for themselves, are sacred, sacrosanct rights
(…) guarded with greatest scrupulousness and most fearful diligence”
(Hegel 1982b, 349).
Hegel’s class critique, directed at the discrepancy between private
and public rights, did not require a revolutionary change of the whole
of modern society. After all, Hegel was not Marx. Rebecca Comay
emphasises that Hegel was not prepared “to identify capitalism itself as
its own gravedigger” (Comay 2011, 141). Instead, he was interested in
some kind of new politically-economic harmony of society that would

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supersede the individualism of the modern world. He was in need of

an overarching philosophical system that would enable the modern
human to perceive and understand the interdependence of many forces
that are operative in society. Following these premises, Hegel had alre-
ady compiled the pamphlet entitled The Magistrates should be Elected
by the People (Hegel 1798), which begins with a call for reform and
appeals to the courage and to the sense of justice among the people of
Württemberg. Under the subtitle “On the recent internal affairs of
Württemberg, in particular the inadequacies of the municipal consti-
tution,” Hegel proclaims:

It is time that the people of Württemberg ceased to vacillate between hope and
fear, to alternate between expectancy and frustrated expectations. (…) For men
of nobler aspirations and purer zeal, it is time above all to focus their undirected
(unbestimmten) will on those parts of the constitution which are founded on
injustice, and to apply their efforts to the necessary change which such parts
require. (Hegel 2004b, 1)

Whether in a revolutionary or in a reformist sense, Hegel finds the

dominant feudal rule absolutely unacceptable, which he made sure to
emphasize on every single page of this brochure. As noted by Ritter,
restoration suffers from internal contradiction as “its inverted character
consists in that it opposes itself antithetically to the present-day princi-
ple and thus negates the historical substance itself, which it yet wishes
to preserve and reestablish” (Ritter 1984, 57). It is the duty of philoso-
phy to reveal these contradictions and offer a comprehensive understan-
ding of the modern world and its development. Likewise, it must be
remarked that social and political experiences do not constitute acci-
dental epiphenomena of the human condition, but are in fact a central
feature of an individual’s relationship to the world. By analysing that
relationship, we develop the power of spirit.
Hegel’s first attempt to systematically elaborate the thus understood
“philosophy of spirit” may be traced back to his System of Ethical Life
(“System der Sittlichkeit”) of 1802/03 (Hegel 1979). It was in this work
that he conducted the most important methodological and epistemo-
logical modifications of his political philosophy (Blunden 2003). Here,
Hegel delivered a vivid presentation of labour typical for the modern
commercial society, and displayed his familiarity with the dynamics of
the capitalist mode of production, which was already in its mature stage
in Great Britain and France, but not in Germany. The results of Hege-
l’s reception of political economy are for the first time crystallized in

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this manuscript (Saito 2015, 35).6 “This description,” argues Herbert

Marcuse, “contains an imminent critique of liberalist society,” in which
Hegel “examines the traditional system of political economy and finds
it to be an apologetic formulation of the principles that govern the
existing social system” (Marcuse 1955, 59–60). System of Ethical Life
represents the political economy of bourgeois property relations in which
law is separated from the rest of social life (Rose 1995, 56).
In a way, the System of Ethical Life represents Hegel’s initial attempt
to demonstrate all private, social and political relations in a breakdown
of the system whose socio-political organisation constructs the process
of self-actualisation, that is, an amalgam of empirical and absolute con-
sciousness, as the ultimate form of cognition. In short, in this social-
-theoretical study, Hegel developed the thesis that people work in close
bond with nature, which also determines the essence of labour. The
result of the development of labour is the need for private property.
Finally, “on the basis of these property relations arise government and
state” (Blunden 2003).
Hegel’s social philosophy is usually presented in a logical and sys-
tematic way, but even during such philosophical-speculative presen-
tation of socio-economic topics, he always insists on empirical reality.
The fact that studies on Hegel all too often ignore the empirical aspect
of his philosophy, as was pointed out by Lukács in The Young Hegel,
does not reduce the value of Hegel’s tendency to critically assess poli-
tical economy (Lukács 1975). Similarly, Gerhard Göhler states that,
for Hegel, looking for empirically given content and its logical and
systematic incorporation into the system are two equally important
moments for formulating statements of social philosophy (Göhler
1976, 78; Hegel 2018, §65, 40; Hegel 1817, §243; Hegel 2014, §2,
§31). This idea is expressed in an even more outright manner in
Lukács’ assertion that Hegel desired to “grasp the true inner structure,
the real motive forces of the present and of capitalism and to define
the dialectic of its movement” (Lukács 1975, XXVII). Finally, Marx,
in his critique of Hegel, emphasizes the inseparability of philosophic-

6 It is noteworthy that Hegel’s System of Ethical Life originated from the

lecture course entitled “Critique of Fichte’s Natural Right,” which was at some
point cancelled due to administrative difficulties. On that matter Kohai Saito
writes the following: “Even if Hegel had modified a great deal of the original
lecture notes in the process of preparing the book manuscript that Karl Rosenk-
ranz later named System of Ethical Life, it still reasonable to assume that he there
elaborated many themes in conscious opposition to Fichte’s system of natural
right” (Saito 2015, 35).

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-speculative method on the one hand, and political economy, on the

other hand:

The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final out-

come, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is
thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives
objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this
alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objec-
tive man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour.
(Marx 1844, XXIII)

When, in System of Ethical Life, Hegel explains the first level (Potenz)
of nature, that is, the inclusion of an object as an aspect of direct empi-
rical connection, he claims that labour is “an identity of universal and
particular,” “is real and living,” and “its vitality is to be known as a tota-
lity” (Hegel 1979, 108). Simultaneously, however, “labour is wholly
mechanical,” which Hegel demonstrates by analysing the correlation of
the growing mechanisation of labour with the resulting alienation of
workers from their labour (Hegel 1979, 108). He expounds the issue
in following words:

(F)or labour, as annihilation of intuition (the particular object—A.Č.), is at the

same time annihilation of the subject, positing in him a negation of the merely
quantitative; hand and spirit are blunted by it, i.e., they themselves assume the
nature of negativity and formlessness (…). In the tool the subject severs objec-
tivity and its own blunting from itself, it sacrifices an other to annihilation and
casts the subjective side of that on to the other. (Hegel 1979, 112–113)

In this paragraph Hegel highlights the advantages and disadvantages

of mechanisation and the social division of labour, which came to be
a subject of some of his later writings (Hegel 2014, §198, 232–3). For
instance, in the Philosophy of Spirit from the Jena period, he described
how, in the context of mechanisation, workers invest a relatively higher
amount of labour than a machine, without achieving what they need
and without needing what they produced. This way, while working
alongside machines, a worker “can produce more, but this reduces the
value of his labour” (Hegel 1983, 138). In addition, abstract labour
creates a gap between an individual and the complete fulfilment of their
needs. As the mechanisation and specialisation of labour expand, the
worker becomes increasingly alienated in the process of production, and
their work becomes “more mechanical, duller, spiritless,” while “the

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spiritual element, this fulfilled self-conscious life, becomes an empty

doing (leeres Thun)” (Hegel 1983, 139). Hegel continues:

Thus a vast number of people are condemned to a labor that is totally stupefy-
ing, unhealthy and unsafe—in workshops, factories, mines, etc.—shrinking Hegel was convinced
their skills. And entire branches of industry, which supported a large class of that dehumanising life
people, go dry all at once because of (changes in—A.Č.) fashion or a fall in circumstances, existen-
prices due to inventions in other countries, etc—and this huge population is tial difficulties and the
thrown into helpless poverty. (Hegel 1983, 139–140) pauperisation of the
working class were not
Hegel was convinced that dehumanising life circumstances, existen- some contingent and
tial difficulties and the pauperisation of the working class were not some accidental side-effect of
contingent and accidental side-effect of the factory capitalist system. In the factory capitalist
fact, “(t)he contrast (between—A.Č.) great wealth and great poverty
system.
appears: the poverty for which it becomes impossible to do anything;
(the) wealth (which—A.Č.), like any mass, makes itself into a force”
(Hegel 1983, 140). He considered poverty an inevitable consequence
of the process of accumulating capital and argued that the enrichment
“condemns a multitude of people to a raw life, to stultification in labour
and to poverty—in order to let others amass wealth and (then—A.Č.) He considered poverty
to take it from them” (Hegel 1983, 145). On another occasion, Hegel an inevitable consequ-
summed up his observations quite perspicaciously and almost epigram- ence of the process of
matically: “Manufacturers and workshops found their existence on the
accumulating capital
misery of a class” (Lukács 1975, 331).
and argued that the
Despite the fact that Hegel studied the phenomena of labour and
dehumanisation within industrial society, whereby his critique of poli- enrichment “condemns
tical economy also took the social division of labour into account as a multitude of people
a crucial element in the capitalist mode of production, the question still to a raw life, to stultifi-
remains if he, even in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, indeed cation in labour and to
managed to provide an adequate solution to the problem of the mecha- poverty—in order to let
nization and division of labour. This open question led Otto Pöggeler others amass wealth
to conclude: “Although he saw that industrialization must give rise to and (then—A.Č.) to take
a »rabble« or proletariat, he did not perceive the explosive force conta- it from them.”
ined in this process” (Pöggeler 1995, 42). Similarly, although Hegel
examined the role of “corporations” as institutions that safeguarded both
the special needs and the collective interests in a civil society, it seems
that he failed to grasp the whole complexity of the problem, since, in
capitalism, labour relations became progressively more complicated and
differentiated (Cesarale 2015, 92). The issue is further tangled by the
fact that Hegel provides an explicit defence of the labour contract, the
practice most essential to capitalism, in which money is exchanged not

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for a commodity of a fixed value, but for the power to create value—
variable capital (Mowad 2015, 71). It will be worthwhile to examine
this issue in its relationship to poverty through the lens of Hegel’s Ele-
ments of the Philosophy of Right in the last chapter of this study.

3. English Resources, poverty, and the Philosophy of Right

There are many references in Hegel’s social philosophy that indicate his
theoretical preoccupation with the political economy of Ferguson, Steu-
art and Smith. No less important is the fact that Hegel knew English
and used English material extensively (Waszek 1988, 84–87). His earliest
explicit reference to Smith is to be found in the first set of The Philoso-
phy of Spirit (Waszek 1988, 128). This manuscript is a striking record
of the impact of reading An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, argues Buck-Morrs (Buck-Morrs 2009, 4).7 In The
Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel’s philosophical attention was caught by Smi-
th’s classical description of the division of labour (Smith 1977, 18–19):

(T)he division of labour increases the mass of manufactured (objects—A.Č.);

eighteen men work in an English pin factory. (…) Each has a specific part of
the work to do and only do that. (Hegel 1979, 248)

In a rather marginal note to this exposition, the name “Smith” appe-

ars only with a page reference (“Smith, p. 8”). In his study, particularly
in the chapter “Hegel’s Contacts with and Knowledge of the Scottish
Enlightenment,” Waszek analyses Hegel’s implicit and explicit theore-
tical indebtedness to Scottish thinkers,8 who had also shown awareness
of the problems of modern commercial and industrial civilisation, for
instance, the dehumanising division of labour, the problem of alienation
and the rampant individualism of commercial society (Waszek 1988,
84–142). In his Heidelberg lectures on The First Philosophy of Right

7 Even though Christian Garve produced a good German translation of

the text (1784–1796), Hegel seems to have used the original English edition. Both
versions, Smith’s original and Garve’s translation, were ultimately in Hegel’s per-
manent library (Buck-Morrs 2009, 4).
8 It is curious that Hegel’s explicit references to the Scottish literati are
remarkably few, given the fact that he drew from their ideas and writings quite
amply. This is explained by Waszek, who claims that, in this respect, Hegel was
simply following the common practice of an age in which philosophical inspira-
tions were rarely acknowledged in footnotes (Waszek 1988, 118).

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Hegel (1995a) draws the consequences of the position he had reached

at the end of his time in Jena, namely that all estates or classes are to be
understood on the basis of the way in which a people’s “labour” is divi-
ded and that the ethical universalism no longer appears in its proper
shape in the virtue of an individual (Pöggeler 1995, 32). Referencing
Smith’s ideas of “proper division of labor” and “proper combination of
different operations,” Hegel writes the following:

(T)he preparation of specific means calls for a particular aptitude and fami-
liarity, and individuals must confine themselves to only one of these. This
gives rise to the division of labor, (a multiplicity of labors—A.Č.) as a result
of which labor or work becomes less concrete in character, becomes abstract,
homogeneous, and easier, so that a far greater quantity of products can be
prepared in the same time. In the final stage of abstractness, the homogeneity
of labor makes it mechanical, and it becomes possible to install machines in
place of people, replacing human motion by a principle of natural motion
that is harnessed to secure uniformity and to promote human ends. (…) (O)
nce factory work has reached a certain degree of perfection, of simplification,
mechanical human labor can be replaced by the work of machines, and this
is what usually comes about in factories. In this way, through the consumma-
tion of this mechanical progress, human freedom is restored. (Hegel 1995a,
§101, 175–177)

Hegel considered labour an abstract rather than a concrete activity

(Hegel 1995a, §91, 165). Given the fact that he simultaneously viewed
labour through the prism of the capitalist mode of production, which
is structurally and historically based exactly on social division of labour,
this peculiarity in Hegel’s thinking betrays a certain ambivalence. Quite
similarly, in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right Hegel introduces the
concept of “abstract labour” in a very dense paragraph:

The universal and objective aspect of work consists, however, in that (process
of—A.Č.) abstraction which confers a specific character on means and needs
and hence also on production, so giving rise to the division of labour. Through
this division, the work of the individual (des Einzelnen) becomes simpler, so that
his skill at his abstract work becomes greater, as does the volume of his output.
At the same time, this abstraction of skill and means makes the dependence and
reciprocity of human beings in the satisfaction of their other needs complete and
entirely necessary. Furthermore, the abstraction of production makes work
increasingly mechanical so that the human being is eventually able to step aside
and let a machine take his place. (Hegel 2014, §198, 232–233)

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Both the Heidelberg lectures on The First Philosophy of Right and the
Elements of the Philosophy of Right are imbued with a mood evocative of
Smith and Ferguson. On one hand, Hegel’s discussions on the division
of labour and abstract labour reflect an enthusiasm for the potential
Hegel’s discussions on emancipatory function of machines, which seemed to promise the wor-
the division of labour king class freedom from the drudgery of labour and a life with a higher
and abstract labour degree of dignity. On the other hand, his teleological approach, built on
reflect an enthusiasm technological determinism, also maintains that the capitalist mode of
for the potential eman- production, as was evident especially in England, engendered a physically
and mentally debilitating form of mechanization that undermined its
cipatory function of
emancipatory potential (Buchwalter 2015a, 10). Likewise, abstract labour
machines, which
revealed its great potential for structuring social relations, but it is, at the
seemed to promise the same time, the origin of their necessity, because it is split in itself (Cesa-
working class freedom rale 2015, 89). Therefore, this discussion creates a certain intellectual
from the drudgery of discomfort, which Giorgio Cesarale describes in the following way:
labour and a life with
a higher degree of The teleological goal turns itself into what dialectically precedes, into mechanism.
dignity. If the “abstraction of production” transforms the teleological goal into mecha-
nism, this means that subjectivity plays no role in the development of the
particular purposes and in the use of the means. (Cesarale 2015, 90)

Since the pre-capitalist Germany of the time, especially those parts

of the country that Hegel did not have the opportunity to experience
first-hand, did not offer sufficient research material for a substantial
political-economic analysis, Hegel had to turn to English, and, to a les-
ser extent, French economics. As in his previously mentioned works, in
the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, that is, in its §189, Hegel also
explicitly refers to Smith, Say and Ricardo (Hegel 2014, §189, 227).
Apart from that, in §200, the theoretical points are fully modelled on
Smith’s classical economics (Hegel 2014, §200, 233–234). Here, howe-
ver, he departs from Smith’s definition of capital, as well as his theory
on creating surplus value, and justifies class differences that emerged
from property inequalities. Moreover, he unhesitatingly states that, for
amassing wealth, it is not enough to simply possess certain skills and
talents—the initial capital is also required. And it was this initial capital
that represented a key source of class inequality.
Additionally, as I already stated above, Hegel regularly read English
newspapers and journals that published long and detailed reports on
relevant political and economic developments in Britain. This may be
observed in his analysis On the English Reform Bill (Hegel 2004c). In
this essay, which was written in 1831 and was to become his last publi-

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shed text—again showing how interested he remained in social, politi-

cal, and economic issues throughout his whole life—he criticised the
feudalist understanding of English law and English hereditary privileges.
In doing so, he accurately demonstrated the problems of nepotism and
corruption. For example, he stated that the sittings of the English Par-
liament were regularly attended only by few officials and that both houses
of the Parliament were basically the property of about 150 men from
the privileged classes (Hegel 2004c, 236). His indignation at the situation
is cynically expressed in the following comment: “Nowhere but in
England is the prejudice so entrenched and sincerely accepted that if
birth and wealth give someone an office, they also give him the intelli-
gence (Verstand) to go with it” (Hegel 2004c, 249). In this work, Hegel
also scrutinises the issues of austerity measures, government expenditu-
res, and taxes for the poor (Hegel 2004c, 242). With equal disgruntle-
ment he describes the expropriation of peasants and colonial conquests
of the English Crown (Hegel 2004c, 247–248).9 Ultimately, in the
spirit of Locke’s theory of government and its administrative realm,
Hegel labels the English state “minimal” (Hegel 2004c, 269).
The most fascinating thing about Hegel’s notes on political economy
is the fact that he managed to resist the tempting, optimistic dogmas of
laissez faire economics that had become quite influential in German
economic circles at the turn of the century (Cullen 1979, 72). At that
time, translations of Steuart’s and Smith’s works were widespread and
popular in Germany (Lukács 1975, 174; Waszek 1988, 56–83). In con-
trast to this trend, Hegel’s economic analyses are accompanied with
remarks on issues of social polarisation, poverty, pauperisation and alie-
nation, prompting us to conclude that he refused to stay fixed on the
ideas of classical economics, especially after he had witnessed the growth
of poverty in modern civil society. One of the reasons why Hegel distan-
ced himself from orthodox British political economy and turned more
to the issues like the social welfare state was the fact that Prussia of the
time was still a largely pre-capitalist country on the verge of undergoing
a transition to full-fledged industrial revolution. Thus, his lived expe-
rience did not match that of subjects from the already well-established
capitalist Britain. This, however, still does not mean that Hegel did not
witness the growing poverty in Prussia first hand, which resulted from
the dissolution of communal estates and the expropriation of the peasan-
try following the Napoleonic wars (Pinkard 2000, 486). As was the

9 Buck-Morrs emphasises that Hegel is in fact the first philosopher describ-

ing world market of the European colonial system (Buck-Morrs 2009, 8).

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general case, the transition from feudalism to capitalism led to “the

creation of a »rabble« of unemployed and unemployable peasants thro-
ughout Prussia” (Pinkard 2000, 486). Although Hegel quite candidly
admitted that his speculative philosophy contained no answer to the
problem of modern poverty (Pinkard 2000, 486), his leap from classical
idealism into materialism, which enabled him to analyse the political
economy of poverty, should nevertheless be understood as a revolutionary
socio-epistemological innovation. It even provided the foundation on
which Marx built the methodological framework for his own critique
of political economy.
This is why the Elements of the Philosophy of Right emerged as a mature
articulation of his social and political thought, as an attempt to syste-
matically articulate the relationship between personal needs on the one
hand, and the community as a whole, on the other. In other words,
the Elements of the Philosophy of Right may be described as Hegel’s effort
to describe a harmonious political system and the rational modern
state, in which the conflicts of the individual and the community, that
is, the conflicts of private interests and communal duties, are resolved
through a synthesis on a higher level. Broadly speaking, Philosophy of
Right, in its fluent triangulation of abstract right, morality and ethical
life could be conceptualised as an account on the ventures of spirit,
progress, and the development of human will through various phases
(or spheres) that ultimately lead to the actualised freedom of an indi-
vidual as a member of society. As nature knows no concept of freedom,
freedom becomes possible only in the domain of law. To the sphere of
ethical life Hegel relegates family, civil society, and state. Civil society
(bürgerliche Gesellschaft) is thereby defined as

an association of members as self-sufficient individuals (Einzelner) in what is

therefore a formal universality, occasioned by their needs and by the legal
constitution as a means of security for persons and property (…). (Hegel
§157, 198)

Hegel points out that civil society, given the gap between the private
and the communal interests, “affords a spectacle of extravagance and
misery as well as of the physical and ethical corruption common to both”
(Hegel 2014, §185, 222). The will of an individual within civil society,
as Hegel has it, is actualized only when the individual is able to possess
an object, which makes private property a necessary prerequisite for
their freedom. Thus, in order for the individual to be free, they have to
own private property as an objectification of their own will. Free indi-

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viduals are so focused on satisfying their private needs and interests that
they lost their last iota of respect for the common good.
It is this problem that led to Hegel’s main dilemma—how to recon-
cile private rights with the need for universality? A rational and moral
state has to secure freedom for the individual, although “particularity
in itself (für sich),” as Hegel writes, keeps “indulging itself in all directions
as it satisfies its needs, contingent arbitrariness, and subjective caprice”
(Hegel 2014, §185, 222). Since “individuals, as citizens of this state,
are private persons who have their own interest as their end,” it is obli-
gatory that individuality thus understood be mediated by abstract uni-
versality (Hegel 2014, §187, 224). The state has to be strong enough to
reconcile individuality with the singularity of ethical life, to facilitate
the unity of individual needs and their fulfilment through “hard work
of opposing mere subjectivity of conduct, of opposing the immediacy
of desire as well as the subjective vanity of feeling (Empfindung) and the
arbitrariness of caprice” (Hegel 2014, §187, 225). In addition, Hegel
emphasizes the need for “(t)he mediation whereby appropriate and
particularized means are acquired and prepared for similarly particula-
rized needs is labour,” (Hegel 2014, §196, 231) whereby labour “confers
a specific character on means and needs and hence also on production,
so giving rise to the division of labour” (Hegel 2014, §198, 232). Such
a relation between universality and individuality in the concept of labour,
as well as in the social division of labour, leads to the creation of “depen-
dence and reciprocity of human beings in the satisfaction of their other
needs” (Hegel 2014, §198, 233). Hegel concludes:

In this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs, sub-
jective selfishness turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of
everyone else. By a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the uni-
versal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own
account (für sich), thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others.
(Hegel 2014, §199, 233)

Although Hegel at one point justified class differences as unavoidable

(Hegel 2014, §200, 233), he was well aware of the growth of poverty as
one of the most significant negative aspects of modern civil society. He
wrote that,

When a large mass of people sinks below the level of certain standard of living, this
leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it much easier for dispropor-
tionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands. (Hegel 2014, §244, 266)

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Poverty occurred precisely due to class differences, which “may reduce

individuals to poverty” and deprive the poor “of all the advantages of
society, such as the ability to acquire skills and education in general, as
well as of the administration of justice, health care, and often even of
the consolation of religion” (Hegel 2014, §241, 265). Hegel argues:

The lowest level of subsistence (Subsistenz), that of the rabble, defines itself
automatically, but this minimum varies greatly between different peoples. In
England, even the poorest man believes he has his rights; this differs from
what the poor are content with in other countries. Poverty in itself does not
reduce people to a rabble; a rabble is created only by the disposition associa-
ted with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the
government, etc. (…) The important question of how poverty can be remedied
is one which agitates and torments modem societies especially. (Hegel 2014,
§244A, 266–267)

If we briefly pause at the last sentence of the cited paragraph and

consider that, already in the next one, Hegel concluded that, “despite
an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough (…) to prevent
an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble” (Hegel 2014, §245),
we can gain the impression that these candid remarks might be read
as an admission of failure to offer the speculative proof that the modern
state is rational, an impression in which we are not alone (Avineri
1972, 154; Teichgraeber 1977, 63–64; Wood 1990, 255; Neuhouser
2000, 174; Losurdo 2004, 177–179). This challenge has not gone
unanswered, and it has spawned a lively debate on the significance of
the problem of poverty in Hegel’s project (Di Salvo 2015, 101).
Having studied the consequences of the English laws on the poor
(Hegel 2014, §245, 267), Hegel attempted to demonstrate the inef-
ficacy of English (and Scottish) methods for combating poverty by
rejecting any possibility of humanitarisation, or such ideas as “limitless
private charity” (Hegel 2014, §245, 267), “subjective help” (Hegel
2014, §242, 265), and “the contingent character of almsgiving and
charitable donations” (Hegel 2014, §242, 265). Instead, he proposed
a solution in the form of allowing everybody the opportunity to work
and introducing progressive taxes for wealthier classes (Hegel 2014,
§245, 267). Besides, Hegel thought that, as the public character of
politics, or the welfare state, becomes “all the more perfect, the less
there is left for the individual to do by himself (für sich) in the light
of his own particular opinion (as compared with what is arranged in
a universal manner)” (Hegel 2014, §242, 266).

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The analysis that Pereira Di Salvo conducts in “Hegel’s Torment:

Poverty and the Rationality of Modern State” reveals another important
consequence of the definition of a person in relation to poverty, as
outlined by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right (Di Salvo 2015). In the
context of abstract right, a person is defined as a concrete embodiment
of their will, but also as owning some property that needs to be actively
used. In property, the person actively relates to the object of their
belonging. Property is therefore a means by which an abstract person
objectifies themselves. To put it differently, the self becomes particula-
rized and concrete through ownership (Schroeder 1998, 34). Hegel
himself notes:

The poor man feels excluded and mocked by everyone, and this necessarily gives
rise to an inner indignation. He is conscious of himself as an infinite, free being,
and thus arises the demand that his external existence should correspond to this
consciousness (…). Self-consciousness appears driven to the point where it no
longer has any rights, where freedom has no existence. In this position, where
the existence of freedom becomes something wholly contingent, inner indigna-
tion is necessary. Because the individual’s freedom has no existence, the reco-
gnition of universal freedom disappears. From this condition arises that shame-
lessness that we find in the rabble. (Hegel 2014, n. 1 to §244, 453)

At stake here is how poverty undermines autonomous personality

itself. Di Salvo suggests that “poverty is problematic (…) because it
constitutes a condition in which a human being is prevented from reali-
zing their capacity for personality in the first place” (Di Salvo 2015,
102). However, Hegel does not reduce the antagonism of wealth and
poverty to a simplistic relationship in which an impoverished individual
is dependent on the arbitrary wills of the wealthy. Instead, he holds that
poverty is problematic because those who are subject to that condition
are rendered incapable of realizing their personality (Di Salvo 2015,
110). It is what Di Salvo calls a condition of “socially frustrated perso-
nality” (Di Salvo 2015, 110) and the reason why Slavoj Žižek argues
that Hegel fails to take note of how the rabble,

in its very status as the destructive excess of the social totality (…) is the “refle-
xive determination” of the totality as such, (…) the particular element in the
guise of which the social totality encounters itself among its elements. (Žižek
2012, 431)10

10 It would be interesting to examine Žižek’s ideas of “social totality” and

“totality as such” in light of his characteristic zeal for the provocative, such as

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This is also one of the main reasons why Frank Ruda reads Hegel’s
ideas on the rabble as a “symptomatic point of his entire philosophy of
right, if not of his entire system” (Žižek 2012, 431). The rabble unbinds
itself from the relations of ethical community, which is what Ruda, in
the Hegel’s Rabble, specifies as the concept of the “organ without a body”
(Ruda 2011, 130). “That the rabble does not have a possession, i.e. not
even of a body,” claims Ruda, “clarifies again that the rabble as matter
of the ethical space cannot be one body among others” (Ruda 2011,
131). This “Hegelian failure” happens at a point where “Hegel was not
Hegelian enough” (Ruda 2011, 168). Susan Buck-Morrs arrives at an
astonishingly similar conclusion, which reveals the fallacies of the pars
pro toto logic emanating from Hegel’s concepts of ownership and pro-
perty. She asks to what extent Hegel may be deemed accountable for
the effective silencing of the problem of race or slaves successfully rioting
against their real masters. She writes thus on the matter:

But what if the “property” is itself the injurer, the slave who rectifies the injury
to his person by asserting his own freedom without compensation? Hegel does
not raise this question (…). The slave is the one commodity like no other, as
freedom of property and freedom of person are here in direct contradiction.
(Buck-Morrs 2009, 52)

However, even if we admit that the implied political and ontological

limitations of Hegel’s dialectic, and acknowledge the “unresolved pro-
blem” of the starving human and a slave (Losurdo 2004, 177), thus
bringing the careful precision of the anatomy of poverty and society
within Sittlichkeit to its logical conclusion, we should not fully dismiss
Hegel’s analysis. In fact, if we point to the non-inclusivity of Hegel’s
universalism and follow Buck-Morrs in her call for the “anticipation of
unity”, we could easily “fall directly into this »anticipation of unity« by
rejecting divisive political identities outright (…) in favour of immediate
and unconditional assertion of universality as a fact” (Ciccariello-Maher
2017, 175). In his Decolonizing Dialectics, George Ciccariello-Maher
claims that “the parameters of (Buck-Morrs’—A.Č.) universal remain
conspicuously Eurocentric” (Ciccariello-Maher 2017, 175). Inspired by
the analytical sharpness of Frantz Fanon, he rejects the supposedly self-

when he urges the Left to openly embrace the particularity of Eurocentrism (Žižek
1998). George Ciccariello-Maher notes that Žižek’s call for embracing Western
culture and “our freedoms” is even more problematic in light of the current influx
of refugees into Europe—a partial indication of the dead-end into which his
uncritical universalism leads (Ciccariello-Maher 2017, 172; Žižek 2015).

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-evident liberalist and Eurocentric concept of “universalism” and takes

a step ahead of liberalist call for the “anticipation of unity” with his
radical and novel reading of Hegel’s slave-master dialectic (Ciccariello-
-Maher 2017, 175). Ciccariello-Maher recognizes the revolutionary
potential in this dialectic’s capacity to allow for a presumption of equality
from the outset under the premise that both parties enter into conflict
with the same standing, with either being able to theoretically emerge
as the victor or the vanquished (Ciccariello-Maher 2017, 55):

(T)he blockage that race constitutes for the Hegelian master-slave dialectic is
a double one, in which the master cannot turn toward the slave, and the slave
cannot turn away from the master. Overcoming this impasse must similarly
trace the contours of the two-way street that is self-consciousness. It must some-
how force the master to open his eyes to the being of the (Black) other, and to
disalienate the slave, to rid her of her long-cultivated inferiority complex and
make possible independence in work (or as we will see, struggle as work).
(Ciccariello-Maher 2017, 59)

As opposed to Hegel’s lenient view of inevitable progress toward

universal self-consciousness, Ciccariello-Maher supports Fanon’s vision
and stresses the need to project blackness subjectively and to do so
“violently” in a way that wakes both the Black slave and the white master
from their respective undialectical slumbers (Ciccariello-Maher 2017,
70–71).
Once we have opened the discussion on the political economy of
poverty, pauperisation and slavery, the next Hegelian question that logi-
cally ensues is: can one think of rabble-politics of equality without the
state? As we have seen, Hegel’s analysis of society clearly points to the
issues of pauperisation, class antagonisms and social sensibilities. Howe-
ver, as noted by Avineri in a somewhat sharp tone, Hegel actually has
no solution to the problems of poverty: “This is the only time in his
system where Hegel raises a problem—and leaves it open” (Avineri 1972,
154). And he is not alone in his critique, since Lukács, Cullen, and other
Marxist authors are even more critical of Hegel’s attitude toward the
poor (Lukács 1959; Cullen 1979; Losurdo 2004). This gives us a reason
to ask another important question—is Hegel a classical liberal of Smi-
thian type, or can we patch the holes in The Philosophy of Right with
state interventionism?
The answer is given by Hegel himself in §236, where he explains
why he is not a laissez faire liberal and in certain way shares the worldview
of interventionists (Ross 2008, 4). He advocated for the concept of the

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“welfare state” (Cullen 1979, 90) and claimed that “the differing inte-
rests of producers and consumers may come into collision with each
other,” which is why it was necessary to introduce the regulation not
only of the market and the prices of certain products, but also of entire
branches of some industries (Hegel 2014, §236, 261). Even though it
is important to insist on the fulfilment of personal interests, Hegel saw
the common good to be far more important in his interpretation of the
goals of political economy:

The right to regulate individual matters in this way (e.g. by deciding the value
of the commonest necessities of life) is based on the fact that, when commodi-
ties in completely universal everyday use are publicly marketed, they are offered
not so much to a particular individual (Individuum) as such, as to the individual
in a universal sense, i.e. to the public; and the task of upholding the public’s
right not to be cheated and of inspecting market commodities may, as a common
concern, be entrusted to a public authority. (…) This interest invokes the fre-
edom of trade and commerce against regulation from above; but the more
blindly it immerses itself in its selfish ends, the more it requires such regulation
to bring it back to the universal. (Hegel 2014, §236, 262)

Hegel’s awareness of the The legacy of Revolution in Hegel’s works, as argued by Losurdo, is
problem of poverty was expressed in two main points (Losurdo 2004, 305). Firstly, there is the
an issue he wrote about affirmation of history as a progressive and difficult realisation of that
throughout his whole concept. Secondly, there is the relationship between politics and econo-
lifetime. His task simulta- mics, a relationship according to which material poverty, taken to an
neously served the extreme, results in a “total lack of rights for the starving individual”
general protection of the (Losurdo 2004, 305). Hegel’s awareness of the problem of poverty was
an issue he wrote about throughout his whole lifetime. His task simul-
“starving individual,” but
taneously served the general protection of the “starving individual,” but
also the freedom of the
also the freedom of the individual within an almighty state. He wanted
individual within an
to showcase the political reach of the state that was not superior in
almighty state. relation to right or individual freedom, since the rationality of the state
intersected with the right. In Hegel’s definition, the state is nothing
more than “the actuality of concrete freedom” (Hegel 2014, §260, 282)
and the actuality of the substantial will, an individual self-consciousness
that transcends into universality. As such, “it is the rational in and for
itself” (Hegel 2014, §258, 275). The reality of concrete freedom
demands that, stresses Hegel:

personal individuality (Einzelheit) and its particular interests...reach their full

development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of

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the family and of civil society), and also that they...on the one hand, pass over
of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and on the other, kno-
wingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own
substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end. (Hegel 2014,
§260, 282)

The state as an idea might exhibit all manner of weaknesses and

deficiencies, but in its realised form it may produce the opposite of what
its idea promised. For Hegel, all the negative aspects of the modern
rational state do not outweigh those that exist in the absence of such
a state. This may well be taken as Hegel’s final thought on the relation-
ship between free will and political universalism.
The philosophical-historical tendency of Hegel to derive all economic
and social categories from the human attitude toward modern civil
society, as discussed by Lukács, resembles an attempt to locate the con-
tradictions of the individual, nature, and society, whose abolition and
restoration makes the structure of society and history intelligible (Lukács
1959, 401). Losurdo concludes that, “(f )rom Hegel on, the discourse
on freedom has become more complex and problematic” (Losurdo 2004,
310). This important Hegelian remark has to be born in mind every
time when we are seriously involved in the field of social philosophy or
think about the problem of the realisation of freedom, thus counterwe-
ighing the speculative spirit and materialism.
Even if we agree that Hegel failed to provide an adequate solution
to the issue of the “rabble,” it still stands that his social philosophy
offers a unique denunciation of poverty and capitalism. He may not
have given an answer to how the economy should be regulated in the
tiniest detail, but his materialistic explanations provide a theoretical
framework for a critique of capitalism in the name of progressive anti-
-capitalist politics. By using Hegel’s theoretical tools, we may achieve
big success in the socio-epistemological sense, since, as Fluss points
out, “the essence of the Hegelian dialectic is critical and revolutionary”
(Fluss 2016). It was exactly these revolutionary potentials of Hegel’s
philosophy that Rosa Luxemburg had in mind when she stated that,
from Hegel onward, philosophical trajectories unavoidably led to the
most dangerous robber caves of Feuerbach and Marx. Even if Hegel
did not set subjective freedom apart from the sanctity of private pro-
perty, his call for solidarity remains an ideal for which we should strive.
If, however, Hegel’s ideals, like freedom, political universalism, the
welfare state, and solidarity with the despised starving human, are to
be observed more attentively, I believe we could without difficulty find

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a fertile soil for the growth of precisely those principles upon which
socialism itself is founded.

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ANKICA ČAKARDIĆ—(Croatia) is an Associate Professor and the

chair of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Gender at the Faculty for
Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb. Her research interests include
Social Philosophy, Marxism, Intellectual History, Luxemburgian and
Marxist-feminist critiques of political economy, and the history of wome-
n’s struggles in Yugoslavia. She is the author of the Rebellious Mind:
Essays in Radical Social Philosophy (2021), Specters of Transition: Social
History of Capitalism (2019) and Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on
Rosa Luxemburg (2019). She is a member of The Complete Works of
Rosa Luxemburg Editorial Board.

Address:
Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
Department of Philosophy
Ivana Lučića 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
email: [email protected]

Citation:
Čakardić, Ankica. 2022. “Hegel and Anticapitalism: Notes on the Poli-
tical Economy of Poverty.” Praktyka Teoretyczna 1(43): 93–130.
DOI: 10.19195/prt.2022.1.5

Autor: Ankica Čakardić

Tytuł: Hegel i antykapitalizm: Notatki z ekonomii politycznej ubóstwa
Abstrakt: Hegel już na samym początku swojej drogi filozoficznej inte-
resował się zagadnieniami ekonomii politycznej. W swoich najwcze-
śniejszych pismach poświęconych religii, polityce i ekonomii Hegel
zwrócił uwagę na temat, który miał odegrać istotną rolę w jego później-
szych pracach: fenomenem własności prywatnej. Aby przystępnie przed-
stawić Heglowską refleksję dotyczącą ekonomii politycznej, artykuł jest
podzielony na trzy części. Pierwsza z nich poświęcona jest Heglowskiej
analizie własności prywatnej, industrializacji i kapitalizmu. Drugi doty-
czy postawy filozofa wobec rewolucji francuskiej, czyli przejścia od feu-
dalizmu do kapitalizmu oraz związanego z nim problemu pracy. Wresz-
cie, trzeci rozdział traktuje o ekonomii politycznej ubóstwa w kontekście
Heglowskiej Zasad filozofii prawa, w których filozof zauważa, że skrajne
​​
ubóstwo i postępująca pauperyzacja nie są zjawiskami przypadkowymi,
ale endemicznymi dla nowoczesnego społeczeństwa produkującego
towary.
Słowa kluczowe: praca, własność prywatna, ubóstwo, państwo, Hegel

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